American Prometheus (100 page)

“ROBERT WAS a very humble man,” recalled Inga Hiilivirta, a beautiful young Finnish woman who had been visiting the island since 1958. “I adored him. I thought he was kind of saintly. His blue eyes were just marvelous. It looked like he could read what you were thinking.” She and her husband, Immu, met the Oppenheimers at a Christmas party on December 22, 1961. Walking into the beach house on Hawksnest Bay, the twenty-fiveyear old Inga was impressed that such a famous man was living in such rustic circumstances. But then she noted that they had all the good things in life too. When Robert asked her, “Would you care for a little wine?” he brought out a bottle of expensive champagne. The Oppenheimers bought their champagne by the case.

A few days later, Robert and Kitty hosted a New Year’s Eve party; they hired “Limejuice” Richards, an elderly black native of the island, to transport guests over the winding dirt road from Cruz Bay in their light-green Land Rover. That night the Oppenheimers served lobster salad and champagne. Limejuice and his “scratchy band” played calypso music. Robert danced the calypso with Inga and afterwards everyone went swimming. “It was really like a never-never-land,” said Inga, “like a dream.” Later that evening, they walked on the beach and Robert pointed out various constellations.

Limejuice became the Oppenheimers’ caretaker and gardener. When they weren’t on the island, he had the use of their Land Rover, which he employed as a taxi to drive tourists around the island. Robert clearly liked the old man and wanted to help him, even to the point of turning a blind eye to his use of the Land Rover to bootleg Tortola rum.

One evening in early 1961, Ivan Jadan caught a small hawksbill turtle while swimming in Maho Bay—and later, over dinner he displayed the squirming turtle and announced his intention to cook it. Wincing, Robert pleaded for the turtle’s life, telling everyone that it “brought back to him the horrible memories of what happened to all the little creatures after the [Trinity] test in New Mexico.” So Ivan carved his initials on the turtle’s shell and then released it. Inga was touched: “It made me feel even more fond of Robert.”

On another occasion, the Oppenheimers were visiting the Jadans at their house perched above Cruz Bay, watching a brilliant sunset. Turning to Sis Frank, Robert rose from his chair and said, “Sis, come with me to the edge of the hill. Tonight you’re going to see the green flash.” And sure enough, just as the sun sank behind the horizon, Sis saw a flash of green light. Robert quietly explained the physics behind what Sis had seen: As viewed from St. John, layers in the earth’s atmosphere functioned like a prism, creating for just a second a flash of green. Sis was thrilled by the sight, and charmed by Robert’s patient explanation.

“He was an unassuming man,” recalled Sabra Ericson. Each September, the Oppenheimers mailed out three dozen invitations to their island friends for a New Year’s Eve party. All sorts of people came—blacks and whites, educated and uneducated. Robert made no distinction. “They were real human beings that way,” said Ericson.

The Gibneys aside, the gentlest part of Robert’s nature was unfurled daily on St. John. Gone were his cutting comments about others. “He was the gentlest, kindest man I think I have ever met,” said John Green. “I have never known anyone who felt or expressed less ill will to any other person.” Rarely did he refer even obliquely to his ordeal. But one day, when the conversation turned to President Kennedy’s promise to send a man to the moon, someone asked him, “Do you think you’d like to go to the moon?” Robert replied, “Well, I sure know some people I’d like to send there.”

Robert and Kitty spent more and more time on the island, often flying in for Easter week, Christmas and a good part of every summer. One Easter week they invited Robert’s childhood friend Francis Fergusson to accompany them. Robert unfortunately caught a bad cold and spent most of the week curled up in bed. Kitty, however, acted the perfect hostess and took Fergusson on long walks on the beach, using her training as a botanist to point out the island’s spectacular flora. Kitty always made a point of liking Robert’s childhood friends, but on this occasion, Fergusson thought her behavior a tad bizarre. “She was trying to flirt with me,” he recalled.

Kitty made a pretense of being a good cook, but this meant their meals had style but little substance. Robert had a fish pot in the bay and they ate a lot of seafood salad, octopus and barbecued shrimp. Like the natives, they chewed on raw whelks, a West Indian snail they could harvest from the beach. One Christmas dinner they served their guests champagne and Japanese seaweed. Robert ate practically nothing. “My God,” Doris Jadan recalled, “if the man ate a thousand calories a day it was a miracle.”

PETER SELDOM came to St. John; as a young man he preferred the rugged mountains of New Mexico. But Toni made the island her spiritual home. “She was very sweet,” said one longtime resident. She took on native ways, and in time acquired a near-perfect command of West Indian Calypso, the Creole English common in the islands. She loved the island’s steel band music. As a young adolescent, she was “a dead-serious child, with beautiful smooth features, tragic dark eyes, long lustrous dark hair, and the condescending politeness of a princess.” Extremely shy, she hated to have her photograph taken. She told friends on St. John that she had always hated the popping flashes of cameras pointed at her whenever she traveled in public with her famous father. St. John was a perfect place for someone who so treasured her privacy.

“Toni was very pliable and very demure,” recalled Inga Hiilivirta, who became a good friend. “Toni would do anything she was told to do. She rebelled later.” Kitty depended upon her heavily, often treating her like a handmaid, asking her to fetch her cigarettes. Toni was always picking up after her mother, and inevitably, as a teenager she began to fight with her. “Toni and her mother were at each other’s throats all the time,” recalled Sis Frank.

One neighbor on St. John recalled that “Robert didn’t pay too much attention to Toni. He was nice to her, but he just didn’t pay too much attention to her. She could have been anybody’s child.” On the other hand, another neighbor, Steve Edwards, thought Robert had “a deep regard for his daughter . . . you could just tell he was proud of Toni.” At seventeen, Toni struck most people as very bright, but also reserved, sensitive and gentle: a very old-fashioned family girl. For a time, Alexander Jadan, Ivan’s Russian-born son, pursued her. “Alex was crazy about Toni,” recalled Sis Frank. But when Toni began to show a serious interest in Alex, Robert intervened, insisting that Alex was too old for her.

As a result of her friendship with the Jadans, Toni decided to study Russian in a serious way. An excellent linguist like her father, she majored in French, but by the time she finished Oberlin College, she could speak Italian, French, Spanish, German and Russian, which she used for her diary entries.

Robert, Kitty and Toni were all expert sailors—or “rag people,” as the islanders called those who preferred sailboats to motorboats. They’d go off on sailing expeditions for three or four days at a time. One day Robert was sailing alone into Cruz Bay’s tiny marina at sunset; with the brim of his old straw hat pulled low over his forehead, he failed to see the bow’s breadth of another boat anchored in the harbor, and he crashed into it, demasting his own boat. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but thereafter it became a family joke to “keep your hat brim up when sailing into port.”

Robert lived a casual life, sailing by day and entertaining a diverse group of island friends at night. Life on Hawksnest Bay could be dangerously primitive. Robert was alone one day when a wasp stung his hand just as he was pouring kerosene into a lantern. Startled, he dropped the jug; it shattered on the tile floor, driving a piece of the broken pottery into his right foot like a dagger. Robert extracted the shard, but by the time he limped down to the ocean to wash the blood away, he realized he could no longer move his big toe. His small sailboat was already rigged and anchored at the beach, so he decided to sail it around to Cruz Bay’s clinic. When the doctor examined him, he discovered the pottery shard had cut cleanly through the tendon in his foot; no longer properly attached, the tendon had receded up into his leg. Robert suffered without complaint as the doctor retrieved the tendon, pulled it taut and stitched it back into place. “Out of your mind,” the doctor admonished him. “Sailing across the bay . . . lucky you won’t lose the whole foot.”

After a morning of sailing or walking the beach, Robert would invite anyone he met to come over for drinks. He still served martinis, but they didn’t seem to affect him. “I never saw Robert drunk,” recalled Doris Jadan. The drinks would turn into dinner and Robert would often begin reciting poetry. In a low whisper of a voice, he would recite Keats, Shelley, Byron and sometimes Shakespeare. He loved
The Odyssey,
and had memorized long passages of it in translation. He had become the simple philosopher king, adored by his ragtag followers of expatriates, retirees, beatniks and natives. Despite his cultivated aura of otherworldliness, he fit comfortably into their island world. On St. John, the father of the atomic bomb had somehow found just the right refuge from his inner demons.

CHAPTER FORTY

“It Should Have Been Done
the Day After Trinity”

I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken
some charity and some courage for you to make this award
today.

ROBERT OPPENHEIMER to President Lyndon Johnson, December 2, 1963

BY THE EARLY 1960S, with the return of Democrats to the White House, Oppenheimer was no longer a political pariah. The Kennedy Administration was not going to bring him back into government, but liberal Democrats nevertheless thought of him as an honorable man martyred by Republican extremists. In April 1962, McGeorge Bundy—the former Harvard dean and now national security adviser to President Kennedy—had Oppenheimer invited to a White House dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates. At this gala affair, Oppie rubbed elbows with such other luminaries as the poet Robert Frost, the astronaut John Glenn and the writer Norman Cousins. Everyone laughed when Kennedy quipped, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Afterwards, Oppenheimer’s old friend from his GAC days, Glenn Seaborg—now chairman of the AEC—asked if he would be willing to endure another hearing to get his security clearance reinstated. “Not on your life,” Robert snapped.

Oppenheimer continued to give public lectures, most often in university settings, and usually he dwelled on broad themes related to culture and science. Since he had been deprived of any status associated with the government, the power of his persona now was entirely that of the public intellectual. He presented himself as a diffident humanist, pondering man’s survival in an age of weapons of mass destruction. When the editors of
Christian Century
asked him in 1963 to list some of the books that had shaped his philosophical outlook, Oppenheimer named ten. At the top of the list was Baudelaire’s
Les fleurs du mal,
and then came the Bhagavad-Gita . . . and last was Shakespeare’s
Hamlet.

IN THE SPRING of 1963, Oppenheimer learned that President Kennedy had announced his intention to give him the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize, a $50,000 tax-free award and medal for public service. Everyone understood that this was a highly symbolic act of political rehabilitation. “Disgusting!” cried one Republican senator when he heard the news. Republican staffers on the House Un-American Activities Committee circulated a fifteen-page summary of the 1954 security charges against Oppenheimer. On the other hand, the veteran CBS broadcaster Eric Severeid described Oppenheimer as “the scientist who writes like a poet and speaks like a prophet”—and approvingly suggested that the award signaled Oppenheimer’s rehabilitation as a national figure. When reporters pressed Oppenheimer for his reaction, he demurred, saying, “Look, this isn’t a day for me to go shooting my mouth off. I don’t want to hurt the guys who worked on this.” He knew his friends inside the Administration, McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., were no doubt responsible.

Edward Teller, who had received the same prize the year before, immediately wrote Oppenheimer his congratulations: “I have been tempted often to say something to you. This is the one time I can do so with full conviction and knowing that I am doing the right thing.” Actually, many physicists had quietly campaigned to have the Kennedy Administration restore Oppenheimer’s security clearance. They wanted a real vindication for their old friend, not merely a symbolic rehabilitation. But Bundy thought the political price too high. Indeed, even after the Administration announced that Oppenheimer would be given the Fermi Award, Bundy waited to gauge the response from Republicans before deciding that the president would personally award the prize in a White House ceremony.

On November 22, 1963, Oppenheimer was sitting in his office, working on a draft acceptance speech for the December 2 White House ceremony, when he heard knocking on his outer office door. It was Peter, who said that he had just heard on his car radio that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Robert looked away. At that moment, Verna Hobson dashed in, exclaiming, “My God, did you hear?” Robert looked at her and said, “Peter just told me.” When others arrived, Robert turned to Peter and asked his twenty-two-year-old son if he’d like a drink. Peter nodded, and Robert walked over to Verna’s large walk-in closet, where he knew some liquor was kept. But then Peter observed that his father just stood there, “his arm hanging down by his side, fourth finger repetitively rubbing his thumb, gazing downward toward the little collection of liquor bottles.” Finally, Peter mumbled, “Well, never mind then.” As they walked out together, past his secretary’s desk, Verna Hobson heard Robert say, “Now things are going to come apart very fast.” Later, he told Peter that “nothing since Roosevelt’s death had felt to him like that afternoon.” For the next week, Oppenheimer, like much of the nation, sat in front of a television and watched the tragedy further unfold.